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Marley's death may have been necessary to launch Charles Dickens' venerable parable of atonement and redemption on that fatal eve, but in 1991, Tom Mula—then in his first of seven seasons playing the role of Scrooge for the Goodman Theatre's annual holiday Christmas Carol—heard a child protest "Marley got a raw deal!" The result, three years later, was Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, a novella that immediately found a publisher and a huge following of readers.
The young critic's complaint was based in the inequity of Scrooge successfully escaping damnation, while Marley remained doomed to wander in chains for all eternity, even after generously extending his duplicitous colleague a timely warning. Mula's narrative opens, therefore, with a now-deceased Marley awaiting punishment for his crimes against humanity. To comfort—and occasionally nag—him on his journey through the afterlife, he is assigned a companion, who hints at a possible plan by which Marley may, literally, save his soul. It will mean shouldering the Herculean task of turning his undeserving former partner to the good in a mere 24 hours, however, and in doing so, reliving his own past transgressions.
Mula had previously authored a page-to-stage solo adaptation of Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao in 1993, and performed Jacob Marley in readings to benefit Season Of Concern. By 1996, though, the stress of playing Scrooge for nine performances a week was beginning to take its toll on the actor. After deciding to make the next season his last with the Goodman Carol, he set out, in collaboration with director Steve Scott, to convert his fanciful yarn into the solo play that he eventually performed in 1999.
The first Jacob Marley boasted a running time of one hundred minutes and took its creator six months to memorize ("even though I was the one who had written it!"). In 2001, Mula and Cincinnati Shakespeare's Jasson Minadakis reconfigured his play for an ensemble of four actors, in hopes of rendering it doable by a larger number of theater companies. Among these are the NightBlue Performing Arts Company, whose current production stars veteran trouper Michael Joseph Thomas Ward as Marley, flanked by Elissa Newcorn, Adrian Garcia and Susan Sjodin playing other requisite personnel (along with a fearsome puppet in the cameo role of the eerie Christmas Yet To Come).
How does Ward feel about taking on this iconic character? "I was aware of Marley from the Dickens classic, of course, but I'd never read Mula's solo version of the play. My interpretation is taken entirely from the text and [director] Molly Burns—and the exchange of energy from the other cast members."
What's the hardest part of doing the show? "Well, Marley still talks an awful lot—but the words are so wonderful that I want to be sure to get them all in, and in the right order. So far, the audiences seem to be as engaged in Marley's transformation as they are Scrooge's—they both follow a similar path, after all."
Mula concurs, "I wrote the book with the sole intent of telling the story, but since then, it's seen nearly three hundred productions on four continents—not bad for a script that's only marketable for six weeks of the year—to become a tradition in its own right."
Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol runs at Stage 773 through December 15.
Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer